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Pixar has a storied history with the annual U.S. SIGGRAPH conference — it was where Pixar first wowed audiences by releasing The Adventures of André & Wally B (1984), Luxo, Jr. (1986), and many other shorts and technical presentations (including this year's experimental short, Purl). Due to the many "wow" moments, we're always excited to see what will be released.

Since the conference is kicked off today (August 12-16 in Vancouver, CA), we thought we'd pull together a list of all the sessions in which Pixar will be involved. If you are in attendance for any of Pixar's sessions, please feel free to reach out and let us know your thoughts (email, post a comment below, or chat about it in the Forum).

According to SIGGRAPH, the conference focuses on "the latest research, newest technologies, and best ideas from the brightest minds", all centered around educational and hands-on sessions in the field of computer graphics and interactive techniques.

EXHIBITOR SESSIONS

The Exhibitor Sessions are "comprehensive summaries of the latest technologies in computer graphics and interactive techniques. SIGGRAPH 2018 exhibitors demonstrate software, hardware, and systems; answer questions; and host one-on-one conversations about how their applications improve professional and technical performance."

THURSDAY, AUGUST 16

PRODUCTION SESSIONS

During the SIGGRAPH 2018 Production Sessions, the world’s most talented production teams share their processes and techniques from some of the most exciting content in computer animation, VFX, games, and VR.

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 15

INCREDIBLES 2: SUIT UP, IT MIGHT GET WEIRD (2:00 - 3:30 PM)

In a conversation that will not only span multiple disciplines but also multiple years of technological advancement at Pixar, the team behind "Incredibles 2" - many of whom also worked on the first film - will compare and contrast the filmmaking process then and now. With a sequel, there’s always the challenge of making a film true to the original, yet different in every detail. In building the world of “Incredibles 2” the team tackled one of the most technically daunting films in Pixar’s canon, all while needing it to hue to the familiar tone established by the first film. Hear from this supergroup as they examine how they used the past to inform the present and, incredibly, achieved the near-impossible

SUNDAY, AUGUST 12

This talk describes how Pixar's character tailoring and shading teams created the fashionable costumes of "Incredibles 2," collaborating with many departments. We dressed a large number of distinctive characters for both the Civilian and Super worlds and found a balance between stylized yet realistic form, shading, and movement.

A major design goal of "Incredibles 2" was to add greater details to the characters' clothes than in the original film. Two methods that helped us achieve this were Bump-To-Roughness to help preserve finer illumination details in the clothing, and curve procedurals to add realism to the garment shading.

Coco's complexity presented challenges for Pixar's Simulation and Animation departments, requiring a new approach to create appealing clothed silhouettes and believable motion. We created a new process, AnimSim, consisting of fast, stable clothing simulations, simple cloth interaction tools, and a refined partnership between the simulation artists and character animators.

The skeleton characters of Pixar's "Coco" brought new challenges to our in-house cloth simulator, Fizt. We describe our enhancements to collision detection and response that we believe would benefit most systems. In addition to collision robustness, we describe techniques to dramatically improve the performance of our implicit solver.

MONDAY, AUGUST 13

"Purl," directed by Kristen Lester, raises the bar for Pixar's storytelling initiative, creating another example of what’s possible when filmmakers are granted this type of creative freedom within a fully functioning studio. This talk looks at the team’s process, as well as the impact of maintaining the program at Pixar.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 14

On "Incredibles," we leaned on 2D drawing and design techniques to drive the way we modeled and rigged. For "Incredibles 2" we strove to redesign the characters to deliver on qualities that couldn't be achieved on the first "Incredibles," while still staying true to the essence of these legacy characters.

For Mrs. Incredible, we faced challenges with a character that can stretch multiple body parts. A skeletal and curve-based rig was utilized to handle stretching topology. Shading tackled texture stretching by manipulating uv-coordinate spaces. Garments used 3D uv-scaling to keep suit details intact when the cloth was stretched or compressed.

Robustly simulating the dynamics of skin sliding over a character's body is an ongoing challenge. We have found that many problems can be addressed by performing 2D ray-tracing over the surface of the mesh. The approach is fast and robust, and has been used successfully in "Incredibles 2."

The stylized world of "Incredibles 2" features large urban crowds both in everyday situations and panicked mayhem. To meet this challenge, Pixar's crowds team developed a system to automatically approximate our complex rigs with skinned skeletons, opening up our pipeline to procedural look-ats, motion blending, ragdoll physics, and motion capture.

USD shading gives us lots of flexibility and provides the immediate basic shading for the BG human skin and hair by default. Maintaining the master asset file for updates, debugging, and additional feature deployment was easier than inspecting numerous individual assets. This workflow is more efficient than what we had.